Media: John Grogan Likes It Ruff

How a not-so-good Philly columnist became America's best-selling author

MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE it’s almost Christmas when I meet him, but John Grogan reminds me of one of Santa’s elves: upright carriage, bright eyes, pointy graying beard, pompous in a way that’s vaguely ridiculous.

“I’m pretty jazzed,” he says of his sudden, and unnerving, success. Grogan, 48, says stuff like “jazzed”; he peppers his sentences with words like “gosh” and refers to his “Hollywood agent” as someone who works with “Michael Orbitz.” This fuddiness is indicative of either his Michigan upbringing, or his time spent among seniors in South Florida, where he was a columnist for the Sun-Sentinel for six years before he was lured to Pennsylvania in 1999 to be editor of Rodale’s Organic Gardening magazine. There, two years in, he was mired in compost — and miserable. “If you think of creativity like an ember, the ember inside of me was just about out,” he says. “I needed to get to a place where I could stoke my fires again.”

We’re having a beer at the Great American Pub in Conshohocken, a couple of blocks from the Inky’s suburban office, which then-editor Walker Lundy fleshed out with staff in 2002 in order to broaden the paper’s appeal to readers outside the city. A friend had told Grogan about the Inquirer job. Unlike his best-known predecessor, the feisty and beloved metro columnist Steve Lopez, Grogan didn’t seem like the sort who would act comically lost every time he took an exit off 476. “John’s a suburbanite himself,” says Virginia Smith, the Inky’s Pennsylvania editor at the time, who hired him. “He was familiar with the lifestyle, and he was passionate about issues, but he could also write these funny stories about being married with three kids and his dog. He had a very wide appeal.”

Grogan’s “charge from above” in his thrice-weekly column, he says, is to connect to suburban readers in Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties, and though he lives outside Allentown, he says he “parachutes into” these areas for column fodder. But the truth is that unlike Lopez or Pete Dexter, the legendary Daily News columnist, he doesn’t do a ton of original reporting. Most of his columns sound off on issues that are already in the news — stuff like Terri Schiavo and intelligent design and the pay raises Harrisburg legislators gave themselves. Like other things with wide appeal, such as, say, Taco Bell, Grogan’s column isn’t necessarily quality stuff, but it gets the job done and can even seem pretty good. He can string a sentence together and has a knack for observing the minutiae of everyday life, though unlike many city columnists he’s not particularly challenging. He doesn’t make his readers think so much as tell them what they already think.

For instance, from the Grogan canon:

Murderers = Bad, especially men who murder women and children (12/20/05).

Overpriced hamburgers = Outrageous (1/17/06).

Puppies = Man’s best friend, but it’s sad when they die (1/6/04, ongoing).